


A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To Bannerslapped

by draconicsockpuppet



Category: Dwarf Fortress
Genre: Agriculture, Gen, Necromancy, Poor Life Choices
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-26
Updated: 2020-04-26
Packaged: 2021-03-02 01:22:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23856805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/draconicsockpuppet/pseuds/draconicsockpuppet
Summary: Once upon a time, a simple farmer found a strange stone slab and took it home.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 10
Collections: What Fen Do (Instead of Going Outside)





	A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To Bannerslapped

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tuesday](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tuesday/gifts).



Once upon a time there was a dwarf named Ducim Ducksyrups, a simple fellow who enjoyed growing mushrooms. He had been born in the mountainhome Fountainbell, but moved to the fortress Bannerslapped in the western reaches upon reaching the age of majority. It came to pass, not too many years later, that the caravan brought news that his mother had passed away suddenly, and so Ducim made it a habit every year after that to travel with the caravan to Fountainbell, pay his respects at his mother's grave, and then return to Bannerslapped along the Deep Roads. This habit continued year after year for several decades.

The caverns between Fountainbell and Bannerslapped were generally quite safe; Ducim was used to avoiding herds of crundles and elk birds, and when he saw webbing, he turned and went a different way. Patrols regularly traveled the road and kept it clear. Yet there were also regions of narrow passages that were easily blocked by rockfalls. All luck runs out eventually, and so one year an inconvenient cave-in led Ducim on a detour into a tunnel that went down, down, down, until at last he came out in a cavern bristling with blood thorns and nether-caps. Ducim shrugged and continued along his way; there would be another tunnel back up soon. There always was.

Not far from the tunnel, he came upon a camp of salamander people, dead and rotting in their bedrolls. There was nothing of value beyond a few primitive tunnel tube blowguns and a mysterious stone slab that the corpses were clustered around.

"What a story!" Ducim said to himself, and picked up the slab and took it with him. He could not read particularly well, but he recognized one word at the top of the slab which was repeated several times thereafter: the name of his mother's favorite goddess, Ursas, goddess of decay, mushrooms, and devouring. A farmer by trade, Ducim felt this was a sign; a gift to him from his dear departed mother, and a reminder to care for his mushroom patches well.

So fortified, Ducim crossed the caverns and returned home to Bannerslapped. He had no room of his own in the fortress, but rather slept in a dormitory near the farming levels. Thus he hid the slab in his favorite plump helmet patch, in one of the manure piles from the sheep pasture, where he could visit it often and where no one else would look.

As time went on, life on the farming levels became a little … strange. The skeletons of butchered sheep got up and went back into their pens, seemingly unconcerned that the meat had been stripped from their bones. Unattended teeth chattered in the trash pile when Ducim walked by. And Old Reg keeled over in the tavern one night, then picked himself up, walked to the middle of Ducim's mushroom patch, and quietly stood there. When the stonemasons tried to take him to be buried, he fought loose and returned. After some discussion, the mayor decided to leave him there, standing at attention and interested in neither food nor drink nor slumber.

It was rather odd.

Ducim began taking mushrooms to the statue of Ursas down in the crypts every week, in thanks for the gift from his mother. He wasn't sure why the goddess of good harvests was tucked away down with the dead, but he had never paid much attention to religious matters before. The statue glowed a little when he paid his respects, and he figured that was how one knew it was working. The other dwarves in the fort, the ones who understood how prayer was supposed to work, probably got their statues to glow all the time.

Ducim gave himself a little pat on the back. After all these years, he'd finally gotten the hang of praying.

Every week when he returned from the tombs, he dug the slab out of the mushroom patch, cleaned off the manure, and tried to read it. But it was no good. He knew what his own name looked like, and the goddess', but there were so many words he didn't know.

There were few people Ducim talked to regularly – most of the other farmers left him alone. The butcher Nish had always been kind to him, even while the other planters and herdsmen called him a naive fool. She seemed clever, too. So he took the slab to her.

"Can you read this?"

She stopped and looked at what he was holding, read a few lines, and then blanched a sickly, ashy color. "Where did you find this?"

"It was a gift from my mother," Ducim said.

Nish shook her head. "Don't show this to _anyone,_ do you understand? No one at all."

Ducim nodded slowly. "Okay, Nish. I won't show anybody."

The next week, Nish was gone. Ducim kept working. Every day he checked, but the slab remained safely hidden in his mushroom patch. Who knew, maybe _her_ mother had died.

The sheep stopped eating, and the manure pile shrank and shrank as they shuffled around listlessly in their pasture, trampling the cave fungi into the mud. Ducim requested ash for fertilizer, but without Nish, no one would help him. They were too busy gossiping over things like bodies disappearing and clumps of hair trying to strangle people. Ducim didn't get what the big deal was. He had to work around Old Reg every day, who had smelled terrible and then stopped smelling at all as his flesh shriveled. So what if a few corpses wandered off?

There were plenty of fruit gathered the previous autumn sitting in the kitchen stockpile, and the brewers were once again out of stone pots. Feeding some fruit to his mushrooms and freeing up the pots was a public service. And if some rats happened to be in the fruit pots when he dumped the contents out into the field, and Ducim's mushrooms curled around them and swallowed them down... everything needed to eat.

Then the day came when no one else reported for work. There was distant screaming, but Old Reg didn't look concerned, and neither did the tattered, rotting sheep the next field over. Ducim kept working.

Finally, three days later, a short figure in a black robe walked up to the mushroom patch while Ducim tended his crops.

"Can I help you?" Ducim asked. His mother had taught him to always be polite to strangers.

"You already have," the figure said, and threw back her voluminous hood. It was Nish, the butcher.

"Did your mother die?" Ducim asked. Why else would she have left?

Nish laughed, and not in a nice way. "Probably. May I see the slab again?"

"My mother gave it to _me_ ," Ducim said. "Yes, you can look at it. I didn't show anyone else, just like you said."

"Good," Nish said. "That will do." She looked at old Reg, who was starting to fall apart, the flesh rotting off his bones and fertilizing Ducim's precious mushrooms. Then she looked at the sheep, which were starting to look rather awful themselves. The miasma of death hung over the field just as it always had, even before Ducim had started his patch, back when the field was only the butchering workshop's charnel heap. "I see you've been keeping busy," she said at last.

Ducim didn't quite see what she was getting at. "I try."

"You should plant more mushrooms," Nish said as Ducim dug the slab out of the muck. "I suspect we'll have plenty of fertilizer for them now."

"Oh, good." Ducim grinned. "I love mushrooms."

* * *

By the time he realized everyone else in the fortress had been killed and reanimated as zombies, well. Nish was the only one who'd ever been nice to him anyway.


End file.
